Why all this fire-breathing nastiness toward the disadvantaged? Why now? To paraphrase Michael J. Fox’s character in “Back to the Future,” have we just become a******s or something?

The United States is in the midst of a flinty, secular Calvinist revival, judging the poor, the disadvantaged and the unemployed.

You may have read House Speaker John Boehner’s recent remark, “This idea that has been born, maybe out of the economy over the last couple years, that, you know, ‘I really don’t have to work; I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around.’ This is a very sick idea for our country.”

It might be, if it were true. In fact, the percentage of unemployed Americans receiving benefits is at a record low. And according to Politifact, there are about three times as many people looking for work — not counting the millions who have simply given up — as there are jobs available.

Are there lazy people gaming the system? Sure. Same goes for from barons of finance and titans of industry to McDonald’s fry cooks — some people cheat. But most don’t.

Boehner, of course, is just spouting the same twisted, Ayn Randian “maker” vs. “taker” brand of social Darwinism now inexplicably embraced by millions of conservatives. It’s just nasty, brutish Calvinism in an economic context: If you are poor or unemployed, it’s evidence that you deserve to be poor or unemployed — the economic gods hate you.

I have some older friends who have recently found themselves unceremoniously unemployed, fired not for cause, but “efficiency.” Now in their late 50s or even early 60s, they are doing their best to find work. It’s unlikely they’re going to find the kind of steady, valuable work they had been doing, in some cases for decades, for decent pay and benefits. For this some label them lazy losers.

It’s worse for the young. The unemployment rate for men 24 and under has been in double digits, three or four times as high as older men, for years. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, wages for men age 25-34 with jobs have fallen by about 20 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1980 (that date is no mere coincidence).

Well, sneer the judgers — and jury members who would happily sentence them to a living hell — they could find jobs if they really wanted to. And if they can’t, well, tough — they are obviously not among the elect.

Bent on finding moral fault, such people are blind to realities. For example, bounding technology and globalization a) are permanently removing good-paying jobs from the economy and b) mean that large corporations can find consumers in Brazil, Indonesia or wherever, so they don’t really need an American middle-class any more. Meanwhile, they are sitting on unprecedented amounts of cash — they don’t want to invest or hire.

I predict that in the next couple of decades, the United States is going to see an enormous swell of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, even 70s, who can’t find a job, whose pensions were canceled to please shareholders and replaced with bogus 401(k) non-retirement plans, and staring at the tatters of a once-solid safety net. Those who can’t move in with grown children may have to form communes and tent cities. (Comedian Albert Brooks has written a pretty good novel on a similar scenario, “2030.”)

Too bad we can’t get these finger-pointers, trickle-down dead-enders and blind moralists to notice the pulsing, bloody gunshot wounds on their feet.

For example, there is a lot of crossover between the scolds and those who fancy themselves advocates of family values. Don’t they know that lousy job prospects and low wages not only cause many divorces, but have literally helped drive marriage rates (except — if this doesn’t get ’em, nothing will — among GLBT Americans) to historic lows? (Again, according to Pew.)

And while corporations can find cheap labor and consumer markets overseas, there is surely a tipping point at which they are going to regret having made it so difficult for Americans to find and keep decent-paying jobs. I’m not talking about revolution in the streets (yet) but simply that there won’t be anyone left at home to buy their stuff.

Lest I come off as a mindless partisan, I’ll just add that the Democratic Party, while not actively hostile and demeaning to the non-elect, is not the advocate many liberals fancy. They’ve utterly forsaken the great equalizer of labor organizing; held individual mortgage owners’ feet to the fire after the 2008 economic meltdown but bailed out the big banks; they’re lousy on consumer protection and have no more interest than their buddies across the aisle in cleaning up a Kafkaesque, Byzantine tax code that rewards tricks for the wealthy and corporations but punishes the great unwashed without access to loopholes and fancy lawyers.

But studies have actually shown that the rich are more selfish — they even shoplift more! — than the “losers” lower on the totem pole. As for non-rich secular Calvinists, could they be projecting their own fears of being unceremoniously booted from the blessed ranks of the elect?

Like you (presumably) I’m beyond disgusted with our mindlessly dysfunctional, money-driven politics. Just thinking about it literally makes most Americans unhappy: “People appear to dislike politics and politicians so much,” Princeton University economist Angus Deaton said of one study, “that prompting them to think about them has a very large downward effect on their assessment of their own lives.”

And I may have crossed a personal Rubicon from disgust to anger in the last month.

First, though I am one of those privileged Americans who have never gone without health insurance, a recent encounter with the system left me fuming. The United States surely has the most maddening, inefficient, creativity- and innovation-crushing system in the world. It’s as if mischievous gremlins got together and said, “Hey, let’s invent the worst health-care system imaginable!”

But at least I had a choice. The Affordable Care Act is better than what we had before, but mostly for millions of previously uninsured and “uninsurable” Americans who now have coverage. But I’m not sure it’s a great improvement for anyone else, including friends of modest means who now pay more for less.

The book peers into the upper reaches of the system, where bank fraudsters who launder money for drug cartels and terrorists on their way to imploding the economy not only get off scot-free, but also are rewarded with billions in government bailouts that allow them to keep their obscene, unearned wealth.

At the bottom, Taibbi finds hapless, helpless people such as undocumented immigrants and minorities who are nabbed repeatedly for minor infractions — possessing a joint or just standing on a sidewalk — and welfare recipients ensnared in the pitiless web of cruel, soul-killing government bureaucracy.

In between lie the tattered remains of “justice,” where judges often are in cahoots with government prosecutors, feckless “regulators” and quota-obsessed cops, and the goal is usually to win a quick, phony plea — lie, basically — and extract fines that will fund more unnecessary arrests, and never mind the truth.

“A guy goes to jail for a joint while an HSBC (bank) executive walks for washing hundreds of millions for drug dealers,” writes Taibbi, whose stories in Rolling Stone about the financial collapse are illuminating and infuriating. “Some guy in backwoods Arkansas gets arrested for forging a check for $450 to bail his girlfriend out of jail but nobody gets arrested for systematically forging hundreds of thousands of signatures on foreclosure documents.”

Thanks to Taibbi, I no longer think America’s divide is between Republican and Democrat or rich and poor. It’s about Big vs. the rest of us. Big Bureaucracy, in government and business alike, Big Justice, Big Law Enforcement motivated more by the promise of government largesse than protecting citizens, Big Tech (hint: Facebook, Amazon and Google are not your friends), Big Security, Big Ag, Big Debt, a Big, Fat Self-perpetuating Military-Industrial Complex, and more.

“The system eats up rich people, too, because it is not concerned with protecting individuals, even the rich ones,” Taibbi writes. “This is a machine that loves and protects money but somehow hates all people.”

“The Divide” exposes the rot at the core of both major political parties, which have fallen into a poisonous, black-or-white infinity loop. I have long believed that government is the only thing standing against a GOP-style Hobbesian nightmare; I still do. But as Taibbi makes clear, Big Government now harms the most vulnerable as often as it helps.

Most Republicans now embrace such lunatic notions as “money equals speech” and corporations have the same rights as individuals, not because it serves them, but because that’s what Big GOP tells them. They march, zombie-like, to the tune of big money in politics and business alike, endlessly chanting, “government is the problem;” (yes, but only partly).

Mainstream Democrats, meanwhile, love government so long as their team is in charge, even, apparently, continual erosion of civil liberties, a president who kills American citizens with a pen stroke and the Borg-like assimilation of power — “Resistance is futile” — by ossified, self-perpetuating bureaucracies. As the occasionally lucid George Will has observed, many seem to believe that “whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering.”

The well-intentioned ACA is the foul spawn of Big Bureaucracy, Big Pharma, Big Hospitals, Big Education, Big Tech and on and on, a lousy, inefficient system that rewards those players at the expense of everyone else, Tea Partiers and liberals alike. Courtesy of Big Politicians who must feed at the Trough of Big Bribery in their unending quest for re-election.

But I’m convinced that if average Americans could just agree to disagree on those big, unresolvable questions the Bigs love to distract us with — personal morals, religion, militarism, Facebook, celebrity superbodies — people on both right and left could join forces against Big Everything to demand change.

Maybe I’m dreaming. But Taibbi has shown us the enemy, and it’s not us. It’s Big.

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Clay Bonnyman Evans is a freelance writer who lives in South Carolina and Colorado. In his career as a journalist, he wrote for such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register and Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.)
His book, "Bones of My Grandfather," will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in July 2018. It is the story of his grandfather, First Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., who was killed in the battle of Tarawa on Nov. 22, 1943 and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Since 2010, Evans has been involved with efforts to recover Marine remains from Tarawa with nonprofit History Flight, Inc. He was present in May 2015 for the discovery and exhumation of his grandfather, who was reinterred in Knoxville, Tennessee in September 2015.
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